cleaning the negative

15 hours of eye burning, shoulder-aching tedium later, we discover that the computer hasn't been saving the files. and so I begin again

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Siren Song

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The Aged General heard it first.  When he was a boy, there had been stories told of such a thing, the kind of stories one whispers in the dark. Never in his long and illustrious career had he ever experienced one, but he was smart and quick  to understand. From the first note, he knew what was happening, and he jumped up to shout a warning and cover his ears. But his hands moved slowly, as if they were under water, and his voice lodged in his throat and came out as more of a strangled cry.  “It’s a si-“   was all he was able to manage – before the sound overwhelmed him.   Afterwards, no one was able to describe the exact melody.  A female voice, mournful, all could agree on that, a single voice sounding like multitudes of simultaneous voices.  The melody was unlike anything they had ever heard, with overlapping harmonic tones. The key was minor.  No, not minor, said the music theory experts, some sort of a variation on the A...
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     This is an old one- from last June- written as I remember it. I wasn’t going to post it, but then I changed my mind, so here it is, long after the event. The facts may have shifted a bit in their transport to the page, for which I apologize. Also, I changed a few of the names.     We were shooting a dolphin tour on a white catamaran off the coast of Hilton Head Island, the last shoot of a day that began at dawn. Just Chris, me, a camera, and a white binder filled with travel channel documents. We shot footage of everyone climbing aboard the boat, shot the tour guide’s introduction. Then we settled in to wait.     “When you did Semester At Sea, did the boat look like this?” I asked.     “Naw, it was a giant cruise ship.”     “Wait,” I said. “I always imagined a great big sailboat. And you had to raise the sails and swab the deck and stuff.”     He laughed. ...
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